LightSwitch and Expression Blend - Will they work

Question

how well can LightSwitch work together with Blend? I saw in some videos that you can use custom Silverlight control in LS and naturally I can create them with Blend.

But can Blend in itself be used to customize the screens of a LightSwitch application? It seems LS doesn't use Xaml but puts all screen in an application.lsml file which is invalid for Blend. Is there support coming here?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

No. You will never be able to customize the LightSwitch 'Screens' in Blend, because as you have seen, they live inside the application.lsml file. If you build a Shell Extension, you could use Blend to do the basic layout, but most of the work is in C# or VB. For a Theme Extension, you could certainly use Blend to edit the Theme Visusl Pallette Resource Dictionary. See this link for the a cookbook guide to building the various types of LightSwitch Extensions: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lightswitch/archive/2011/03/16/lightswitch-beta-2-extensibility-cookbook.aspx. There is also now an accompanying Visual Studio project template available for Beta 2.

Answer 2

LightSwitch works fine with Expression Blend, but only for custom Silverlight controls (Expression Blend will throw an error that it can't load any LightSwitch projects that are part of the solution, but it will load any Silverlight control projects).

You cannot edit any of the automatic LightSwitch UI, but you do not have to use any of the standard LightSwitch UI if you need changes.

I would recommend creating Silverlight custom controls not LightSwitch extensions, the difference is that a control extension has a design-time experience in Visual Studio and is MUCH harder to create (Silverlight custom controls are actually very easy to create).

See this article for an example: http://lightswitchhelpwebsite.com/Blog/tabid/61/EntryId/2/Creating-A-LightSwitch-Custom-Silverlight-Control.aspx